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NEW YORK – Poet Rita Dove has a pointy, easy purpose in reaction to receiving a National Book Award for lifetime achievement: “I want it to be a milestone, not a tombstone.”
“It may seem like a rather macabre metaphor, but I simply meant — knock on wood — that I haven’t reached the end of my journey as an artist. I’m still observing, questioning, exploring,” she provides.
The National Book Foundation, the nonprofit which gifts the e-book awards, introduced Friday that Dove is that this 12 months’s winner of its medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, an honor prior to now given to Toni Morrison, Edmund White and Art Spiegelman amongst others. Dove, 71, has been a printed creator for 50 years, her notable books together with her Pulitzer Prize-winning assortment “Thomas and Beulah,” impressed by way of her maternal grandparents.
She is perfect identified for her poetry, however has labored in different artwork bureaucracy and is lately making plans a memoir. She has revealed brief fiction, the radical “Through the Ivory Gate,” the play “The Darker Face of the Earth” or even collaborated with the Oscar-winning movie composer John Williams at the tune cycle “Seven for Luck.”
“Rita Dove’s oeuvre — from poetry, plays, and songs to essays and fiction — is a testament to her dazzling skill across genre and form,” Ruth Dickey, the National Book Foundation’s govt director, stated in a remark. “Dove’s work transforms the everyday into the remarkable, brilliantly blending music, politics, and, let’s not forget, pleasure.”
The National Book Award rite is scheduled for Nov. 15 in Manhattan, with Drew Barrymore website hosting. Besides the tribute to Dove, winners will likely be introduced in 5 aggressive classes: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translation and younger folks’s literature. The basis additionally will provide a Literarian Award to Paul Yamazaki, the longtime purchaser at San Francisco’s famed City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Poet and City Lights co-founder Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died two years in the past, won the inaugural Literarian prize in 2005.
Dove, a local of Akron, Ohio, has lengthy excelled academically and professionally. As one of the vital nation’s most sensible highschool scholars, she was once named a Presidential Scholar. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Miami, in Ohio, and later won a grasp’s from the outstanding ingenious writing program on the University of Iowa. In 1993, in her early 40s, she was the youngest individual on the time appointed U.S. poet laureate and the primary Black author to grasp the location.
Dove has won such a lot of earlier honors, lifetime and aggressive, that it’s nearly unexpected the e-book basis didn’t get round to her quicker. Besides the Pulitzer, she has won each a National Humanities Medal and National Medal of Arts, an NAACP Image Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress and a gold medal for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, together with honorary doctorates at dozens of schools.
A fellow Pulitzer winner, poet Jericho Brown, will introduce Dove on the National Book Awards.
Dove’s influences vary from Shakespeare to a parody of William Blake that gave the impression in Mad mag. Her topics are similarly eclectic, whether or not her grandmother dusting and bringing “dark wood to life,” the “trim name” and bold dream of Rosa Parks, or the poet’s personal love for dancing. When her area in Charlottesville, Virginia, was once badly burned by way of a lightning strike in 1998, she and her husband Fred Viebahn realized ballroom dancing as some way to heal: They even added a ballroom area when the house was once rebuilt. She known as her first poem written after the hearth “Foxtrot Fridays,” which reads in part:
Thank the stars there’s a day
each week to tuck in
the grief, lift your pearls, and
stride brush stride
quick-quick with a
heel-ball-toe.
Authors often speak of declining values and standards, but Dove welcomes the evolution of poetry since she started out. For a Black woman poet, the field once seemed restricted to one favorite at a time, with the expectation that the poet would address “the Black experience,” she remembers. Dove now sees way more chances, and praises such organizations as Cave Canem, a New York City-based group that helps younger Black poets. Dove herself has guided younger writers as an inventive writing trainer on the University of Virginia, whilst additionally operating to amplify poetry’s attraction right through her time because the U.S. laureate.
“People seem frightened of poetry, and somehow separate it from their lives, when, in fact, poetry is the essence of life,” she says.
